More than 1 in 4 U.S. adults live with a disability, according to the CDC. An inaccessible website doesn't just create legal exposure. It quietly turns away donors, volunteers, and the people your programs are meant to serve. Courts have increasingly treated nonprofit websites as "places of public accommodation" under Title III of the ADA, and any nonprofit that receives federal funding is also subject to Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. Accessibility is both an ethical and legal consideration.
Start with the pages that carry the most risk
Before polishing the whole site, focus on donation forms, event registration, and program applications. These are the pages most likely to appear in a demand letter, and the ones where a barrier directly costs you a donor or a client. Check that every field has a visible label, that the whole form works with a keyboard alone, and that error messages don't rely on color alone to be understood.
Free and low-cost fixes
- Add alt text to meaningful images (skip purely decorative ones).
- Check color contrast with a free tool like WebAIM's contrast checker.
- Use real heading structure (H1, H2, H3) instead of just bold text, so screen readers can navigate the page.
- Caption videos. Many platforms auto-generate captions. You just need to review them for accuracy.
- Run a free automated scan with WAVE or Lighthouse to catch quick technical wins, then follow up manually. Automated tools only catch a portion of issues, so a quick keyboard-only pass through your site matters too.
- Publish an accessibility statement. Documenting what you've fixed and what's next shows good faith, which matters to courts and supporters alike.
Prioritize, don't try to do it all at once
With limited budget and bandwidth, sequence the work: fix your highest-traffic, highest-stakes pages first, use free tools to find quick wins, and build accessibility into your next redesign rather than only retrofitting the current site. It's far cheaper to design accessibly from the start than to fix it after launch.
Accessibility is also core to how we build nonprofit websites at our design agency. Our team designs and develops to WCAG standards from day one and offers accessibility audits for organizations working with an existing site.
See how we approach websites
